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He smirked. “I can see your evil wheels turning. I love your evil wheels.”
“Two conditions,” she said.
He snorted. “You can’t negotiate a Shenanigan.”
“Did I hear the words ‘I hereby officially declare a Shenanigan’ come out of your mouth? Because the rules clearly state that until you have uttered those words, the Shenanigan is not on.” As if he could out-Shenanigan her. Please. He might pretend to be the King of the Shenanigan, but they both knew only one of them had thought up the rules to this little game.
“Fine. What are your conditions?” he asked, his arms crossed.
She counted on her fingers. “One, I will go on a single date. I don’t have time or patience for more.”
“Oh please, Hannah.” He scowled at her. “You can do better than that. We can’t find out if we should spend the rest of our lives together in one date. Ten dates.”
“Are you kidding me?” she asked, aghast. “Three. Max.”
“Six,” he countered. “That’s enough time to actually be sure.”
“I will go on five dates with you. No more. This is final.”
He pumped his fist, and she frowned. Damn it, he’d known she wouldn’t agree to ten, so he’d manipulated her up to five. Point to Blue.
“It’s a deal,” he said. “What’s your other condition?”
She smiled wolfishly. “When you leave, you sign the divorce papers.”
“I do not love your evil wheels.” He gritted his teeth, then relaxed. “Caveat. All five dates must be completed, in good faith. We will take turns planning them. During the time when we are on the dates, you must give dating me an actual chance. And if you call it off at any time before the five dates are over, the deal is off.”
She pushed her sparkly purple glasses up to the top of her head and tapped her mouth. “This will be easy. By the time the wedding is over, you’ll be running to get away. This is my home turf, LB, and you hate this turf.”
He raised one hand, in the time-honored tradition of their childhood ritual. “I, Levi ‘Blue’ Matthews, hereby officially declare a Shenanigan.”
It was done. Once those words were spoken, a solemn and sacred trust had been invoked, and neither of them would violate it.
“This is a catastrophically bad idea doomed to failure and heartache,” she told him.
He grinned. “Catastrophically bad ideas doomed to failure are my favorite kind.”
He was smiling at her. Not his TV smile, or his company smile, but the real Blue smile. Damn, that smile and the trouble it used to get her into. Years ago, before he was angry cactus teen, when he was a little boy who loved Shenanigans, that had been his only smile. Whenever that smile managed to make its way past his walls, she fell for it, because she missed it so much, and it never ended well. And now he was smiling like that at her, because he’d dared her and she’d fallen for it.
What had she done? Of course he would see her request for a divorce as a challenge. Of course he would decide, after years of not wanting her, that he wanted her back the minute she said it was impossible. She should have known he would. But shedidknow if she gave him enough time, he would start looking toward the horizon. She knew nothing would ever keep him here for long, not even her. She needed to wait him out, until he got the urge to run. It shouldn’t take long. She just needed to survive a couple of dates with her husband.
“I’m going to go plan our first date,” he said, heading out of the dining room.
She rolled her eyes. “Maybe you should start planning what you’re going to serve Delilah Davenport, because she’ll be here for dinner with her team in two days.”
He had to plan dinner, butshehad to tell her fellow co-owners he was both staying and helping with an event, with her consent. She thought about putting off that conversation but decided she’d put off enough difficult conversations for the time being. She called them into her office.
Technically, as the events manager, she had the right to make unilateral decisions about these things. Technically, as an equal shareholder, Levi could stay wherever he wanted. Given how angry Noelle currently was at both of them, she was pretty sure neither of those technicalities was going to win her over.
“Okay,” she said to her two best friends, standing in front of her desk and power posing to try to give herself some confidence, “I told him he could stay long enough to do the food for the Davenport wedding.” She didn’t explain who “him” was. She didn’t need to.
“Delilah wants him because he’s semi-famous in Australia or whatever, and the wedding is great publicity for us, and I felt guilty that I basically kept him from seeing his mom for years. And Mr. Matthews keeps watching Levi with these sad eyes and I can’t stand it.” Now she was rambling to fill up silence. She didn’t tell them about the dating deal, because there was only so much information she could ask Noelle to ingest at once. Besides, there was no way it was going to change anything, so Noelle and Miriam didn’t need to know.
Noelle had her arms crossed, and her mouth was tight. “First it was, I need to get him back to sell the shares. Then it was, oh oops, I forgot to tell my closest friends we’re actually married. Now it’s, oh he needs to stay a little while because his parents miss him.” Hannah flinched. “If you want him here, tell the truth. Oh wait, you can’t. You can’t tell the truth about him. Because you two are a sick little secret club. Can’t let anyone in, they might see how fucked up we are!”
Hannah’s hackles rose. “Maybe it’s ‘can’t talk to Noelle about this because I know she’ll come to the worst conclusion no matter what!’ Have you thought about that?”
Miriam put her hands up between them. “I am actually wondering why you got secretly married. You were engaged. Couldn’t you have just gotten… not…secretly married? Regular married?”
